Rocket reportedly misses U.S. forces

May 12, 2002|By From Tribune news services.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — For the second time in two weeks, a rocket missed U.S. Special Forces troops hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan's frontier tribal belt, a local official said Saturday.

The target was a vocational school in Miran Shah where about seven Americans are thought to bunk while working with Pakistani troops in the semiautonomous region along the Afghan border. U.S. officials have not confirmed their presence at the building.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, 600 Afghan refugees who were thwarted in attempts to reach Australia before the start of the U.S.-led war began returning home Saturday. At the same time, about 200 Pakistani prisoners captured while fighting alongside the Taliban were sent back to their country.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official in Miran Shah said two rocket launchers had been hooked up with timers in woods less than a half mile from the school and were aimed at the building.

The first rocket was fired about 10:30 p.m. Friday and hit a sports complex 150 to 200 yards from the school, causing little damage and no injuries, he said. The second was set to fire at 2:25 a.m. Saturday but was found and defused, he said.

The official said it was not known who was behind the attack.

A "big bang" caused people to flee their houses, fearful they were under attack, one resident, Mujdaba Khan, said by phone. "People were worried about what happened."

Early on May 1, a rocket was fired at the same school but struck a building about 300 yards away. No one was hurt in that attack--the first time U.S. forces came under fire since they began operating with Pakistani troops in the region several weeks ago.

The morning after that attack, people in the area found pamphlets from a previously unknown group calling on Muslims to "stand up against the army of Jews and Christians." The pamphlets also said the killing of Pakistani troops and officials assisting the Americans was "justified."

The arrival of U.S. Special Forces troops in the frontier area has provoked protests from the fiercely independent tribesmen, whose region generally has been off limits even to the Pakistani army. The area has been a stronghold of support for Osama bin Laden, and its religious schools supplied recruits and some of the leaders of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban.

Tribesmen have staged several demonstrations threatening violence if the Americans do not leave the area.

Pakistan's government says the Americans are providing only communications and intelligence assistance, but tribesmen say they have seen American soldiers with Pakistani troops on raids of religious schools in the area.

Afghans repatriated

In Afghanistan, the 36 Afghans who flew home from Indonesia on Saturday marked the beginning of a mass repatriation of 600 Afghans stranded in that Southeast Asian country when they tried to get to Australia to seek political asylum.

Last August, Australian Prime Minister John Howard stopped the influx of Afghans, who reached Australia on rickety boats with the help of smugglers. Those caught were sent to camps in the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

More than 500,000 Afghan refugees have come home in the past two months, most of them from camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

Pakistani prisoners released

Also Saturday, 204 Pakistani prisoners were flown home after a northern Afghan leader released them from the squalid Shibergan prison, where they had been held for nearly six months in cramped quarters and with little food.

Pakistani C-130 transport planes took them to Peshawar, near the Afghan border, and prisoners were put on police buses under tight security. They appeared to be mostly in their late teens or early 20s.

Like 30 earlier arrivals, they will be detained in a Peshawar jail while authorities check their identities and determine whether they committed any crimes, said Attar Manilla, the provincial minister for legal affairs.

At the U.S.-led coalition's air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, a Bosnian mine clearer lost a foot when he apparently stepped on an anti-personnel mine. The injured Bosnian, a civilian whose name was not released, was evacuated to a U.S. Army facility in Germany, said Maj. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman.

The Bosnian was checking uncleared land at the time with a dog trained to sniff out explosives.

Mine accidents common

Several coalition military personnel have been injured in mine accidents at Bagram, a largely derelict former Soviet airfield that was a frontline for years between battling Taliban and Northern Alliance forces.

Since Dec. 6, mines, booby traps or munitions exploding have killed 14 coalition personnel in Afghanistan, including Afghan troops. Twenty-eight have been maimed.

Every day, several large explosions send shock waves across the base as Norwegian, U.S., Polish or other demining teams try to clear land for the increasing number of coalition forces.

In addition to buried Russian, Chinese, Italian and Afghan-made land mines, Bagram is littered with thousands of unexploded artillery shells, rockets and other munitions, known as UXOs, or unexploded ordnance.